Cookies
My website no longer uses cookies... Most websites do.
Image from muppet.wikia.com
Why was I using cookies?
I used a little script on each page for Google Analytics. This script sendt data to Googles servers every time a page of my site was viewed.
I had access to this data using Google Analytics tools, which allowed me to see how many hits each page was getting.
The downsides to Google Analytics is that my data was being data-mined to give them useful marketing information / "big data", but for you, it means a cookie or two on your computer, and pages that load a bit slower.
I don't like the ethics of "big-data".. people are suckered in to thinking that they're getting something for nothing (Facebook, etc..) but in reality nothing is free. You pay them with infomation on how you live your life, which to me is priceless, but the underhand nature of these sites doesn't mention how your data is used to push their shareprices up.
What's the big deal?
Almost every website saves cookies to your machine, mostly they are used to tailor website adverts to your tastes. I'm not interested in advertising to you, I was just innocently curious about my hits and where they came from.
I Got Rid Of Them
The data I was seeing from Google was so polluted with false hits from spammers etc.. that it wasn't very useful, so after 6 months of trying, I have just removed the scrips from each page, which means no more cookies for you!
Page Load Speed
The speed that a web page loads can be improved by reducing the amount of tasks your browser has to carry out when opening a page. By me using as little "external" content as possible, the browser is only having to read from my server and one or two other places, so most information comes from one place. Using Google Analytics meant that your browser was having to read form my server, work on your cookies, go off and talk to Googles server, then display the page. I've simplified this by ditching analytics.
I'm using an aincient laptop for most day-to-day stuff including writing this website. When I use it to view some webpages (Youtube and some blogs), they take forever to load due to the amount of external adverts, tracking, analytics taking place.
The only page with much externally loaded content is the home page, as it displays a Twitter feed, a GoDaddy verification symbol for SSL security, and PayPal donate button, so your browser has to go off to to their servers for this information, which slows down the page load speed a touch.
Your browser may tell you what it's loading, and from where, for example, Firefox displays these messsages in the bottom left corner as my home (index.html) page is loading:
Overall this makes my site much friendlier for older / simpler computers, and given the fact that my home upload speed is only about 0.7mb/s, I can't serve the data very fast, so simplicity is key.